Silence in the Snow
by mangaluva
Summary: I hadn't expected to find another trainer on top of Mt Silver. But I did, and he gave me the toughest battle of my life. It was also the most exciting, the strangest, and the saddest. Oneshot. Set at the end of Pokemon HeartGold/SouSilver.


_**Silence In The Snow**_

_(I've been making a lot of train trips lately and playing a lot of Pokémon HeartGold when I do. I guess it's getting into my head because of it because last night I had a very sad dream about being alone in the snow on Mt Silver, and this fic happened._)

It was the toughest battle of my life. It was the most exhilarating battle of my life. It was the strangest. It was the saddest.

I really hadn't expected to see another trainer at the top. I'd defeated sixteen gyms, defeated the Elite Four (twice, even after they'd all trained to surpass me), defeated the criminal organization Team Rocket, and defeated every trainer or wild Pokémon that had come my way. So when Professor Oak told me about Mt Silver, warning me that it was full of horrifically strong Pokémon, it just sounded like another challenge and a chance to get some rare Pokémon for my 'dex.

I had expected horrifically strong Pokémon, and I got them, though I was stronger. I hadn't expected the horrific weather, though I was probably a fool not to. Without the warmth and strength of Typhlosion and the psychic support of Alakazam, shielding me from the worst of the snow and thickening the air to make it breathable, I would never have reached the peak. And while I really hadn't expected a horrifically strong trainer, when I did reach the top, that was what I got.

He was a little older than I was, I think, because he was a bit taller, though his red cap was pulled over his face so I couldn't see what it looked like. I thought I was hallucinating at first, the cold finally getting to me. He just stood there, ankle-deep in snow, watching me. He didn't seem as cold as I felt, even though I was clinging closely to Typhlosion and he was only holding a Pikachu. Surely jeans weren't _that _much warmer than shorts? But he wasn't shivering; his breath didn't cloud the air like mine.

"Hello?" I called, but there was no response. Maybe the wind was whipping my voice away. Typhlosion was nervous, beginning to growl and bristle; through his psychic power I felt fear in Alakazam, an intense desire to be back inside his pokéball. I returned him, even though it made it noticeably harder to breathe, and started walking towards the strange boy. Before I got more than fifteen feet away, however, his Pikachu leapt from his arms towards me, sparks flying from its cheeks. I stopped abruptly and so did it, sitting there, sparks leaping in the air around it. We both stood there for long moments, I wondering if it was about to attack me, but it made no further moves towards me, and indeed it didn't look angry or defensive at all. It was smiling. It looked excited.

"… You want to battle?" I realized, looking from the Pokémon to its trainer. I shouldn't be that surprised; it's what trainers do when we meet. The boy nodded, confirming it in lieu of the normal eye contact; his cap was so low and the light so bad that I couldn't see more than his mouth, set in a completely neutral expression. I looked back at the Pikachu, and then I grinner. Another trainer who'd made it all the way up here _had_ to be good!

"Okay then," I said, motioning to Typhlosion, who lumbered forward, roaring loudly, the excitement catching. I was glad I'd taught him to dig. "You're on. This looks like fun!"

He just nodded again.

Oh, and it _was_ fun. I'd never fought anyone so clever, or with such well-trained Pokémon. Even the Elite Four didn't have Pokémon at such a high level. He didn't even have to call out commands. They responded lightning-quick to the ebb and flow of the battle, keeping me and my Pokémon on our toes. After so long without a tough battle, one that made me genuinely uncertain of whether I could win or not sent adrenaline singing through my veins. Even without Typhlosion at my side, even after he had fainted and his fires were little more than embers, I didn't notice the wind or the snow or the cold.

At the worst point, I really was almost defeated. I spoke directly to him there, longing to voice my defiance until the end. "I beat sixteen of the best trainers in the world and took their badges," I cried. "I defeated the Elite Four; I walked all _over_ Team Rocket. I won't be beaten now!" For the first time, expression crossed his face; a slight opening of his mouth, as if in surprise, and then, mouth closed again, his lips stretched into a broad grin. It was only a moment, and then we both dove back into the battle, where Gyarados struck a timely critical hit and gave me the time to slip out a couple of precious Max Revives to my team.

The battle was long, his team well-balanced and well-trained; but Espeon, Snorlax, Charizard, Venusaur, Blastoise and eventually even his almost unnaturally strong Pikachu fell. It took me to my last Pokémon, but in the end, I won.

We watched each other for a moment when Pikachu keeled over with a pitiful little cry that almost made me regret winning, Typhlosion slumping and panting in exhaustion. Then, at the same moment, we bolted over to our weakened Pokémon, I pulling out a bottle of Full Restore as I ran.

Spraying it over Typhlosion, I looked up at the boy, only a couple of feet away now, cradling his Pikachu. It was the closest I'd gotten to him. Though he held the Pokémon gently, he didn't pull out any items to heal it; in fact, though I burned through a good bit of my healing supplies, he hadn't used a thing, instead frequently switching Pokémon to play with type advantages. He looked up at me again, and though I still couldn't see his face clearly I felt like I was meeting his eyes.

He smiled again, a wide but soft expression, and then he vanished.

I wanted to go looking for him, but my Pokémon were all weak or fainted and my supplies were low; I had to leave, to get them to a Pokémon centre. In my brief search before reviving Pidgeot and flying from the peak, I couldn't even find his footprints in the snow.

Several days later, refreshed, restored and having drunk every drop of hot chocolate in my house, I made a trip to Pallet Town, intending to pay Professor Oak a visit. I wanted to show him some new Pokémon that I'd caught, and ask him about the other trainer on the mountain. Unfortunately, though, according to one of his assistants, he'd gone to visit his grandson in Viridian.

Having nothing else to do but not wanting to follow him to Viridian and interrupt a family visit, I was pottering about aimlessly in front of the lab when a lady invited me to wait for the Professor in her house. This sort of thing happens a lot in Johto and Kanto; people are happy to let travelling trainers, especially kids, rest up in their houses, even for an hour or two, and chat about the local Pokémon and leaders and events. Some even like to give you useful things to support you. So there's nothing suspect about people inviting kids into their houses; aside from anything else, any kid travelling alone is a trainer, and thus likely has with them something that can bite, stab, spray poison or fire, electrocute, or some combination of the above.

The lady was a little older than my mother, with long dark hair and a big smile. She appeared to live alone, but when I popped upstairs to use the bathroom, I saw two bedrooms, one with the nameplate "Red".

So I snooped. Like I said, it's an open society.

It seemed to have been recently cleaned and dusted, but still seemed to be unused. The TV, computer and SNES were all kind of old, not ancient but definitely out of date (I mean, come on. A SNES?). I left pretty quickly, guessing that she must have a kid who was a trainer and not wanting to be caught snooping.

I nearly had a heart attack when I went back downstairs, entered the living room, and saw the boy from the mountain grinning brightly out of every photograph.

"That's him!" I blurted out. The woman looked at me in surprise. "Er… I mean… When I went to the top of Mt Silver, he was there!"

"You saw Red?" The woman gasped, her hands flying to her mouth. "He's okay?"

"I think so… his Pokémon certainly were," I replied, unable to help grinning. "He gave me one hell of a battle."

The woman smiled broadly. "Thank heavens. I've been so worried. My son hasn't contacted me for over a year… he's often gone long periods without contact, while travelling, but it's been a while, even for him. I'm so glad he's okay."

"He surprised me," I admitted. "I had no idea any other trainers were on Mt Silver…"

"Well, it was three years ago that he first went," Red's mother explained. "Just after he defeated the Elite Four, he was the first trainer to explore and map the Cerulean Caves. Because of that, Professor Oak helped him get permission to climb up Mt Silver, which had been previously closed to all trainers because of the strength of the wild Pokémon there. Even Lance the Dragon Master refuses to climb it. Red took to the challenge enthusiastically, though, and it's pretty much become his private training ground because of it. He spends most of his time there, though when we made first contact with Johto he travelled over and became the first Kanto trainer to defeat their new gym challenge. Then he went back up the mountain, and I haven't heard from him since…"

"So I'm the second trainer to climb Mt Silver?" I asked in surprise. No matter how many gyms I beat, no matter how often I walked down the Hall of Fame, no matter how many vicious underground criminal syndicates I defeated, I kept forgetting that, by eleven, I had done more and gone farther than many adult trainers ever did or would. But realizing that I had reached a level that only the Legendary Red- I recognized the name now; who _didn't_ know it?- both frightened me, yet made me prouder than anything.

"Well, two other trainers have the right, they just don't use it," Red's mom explained. "Lance, of course, and Blue Oak. He's trained at the base of the mountain since he became Viridian's gym leader and I'm pretty sure in the past he periodically challenged Red to rematches, but he's never climbed the peak. He refuses to until he beats Red. They've been rivals since they were babies, you see, but they're also best of friends. Blue defeated the Elite Four first, you know, back when they were maybe a little younger than you, but then my Red defeated the Four and Blue all at once! Red's undefeated, but Blue insists that he'll be the first and only one to defeat him…"

"He won't." I almost murmured, I said it so quietly. But Red's mom heard me, and paused, looking inquisitively at me. I cleared my throat. "When Red and I battle on Mt Silver… I won."

"You _WHAT_?"

When Professor Oak had returned in the evening, his grandson Blue had come with him. Only thirteen, yet considered the strongest of the sixteen leaders, Blue was like I remembered him from our battle a few months ago, with a huge mop of spiky brown hair and an even bigger ego, yet an oddly pensive side to him. At the moment, he was furious.

"How could someone like _you-_" he fumed, pointing rudely at me, "-beat _Red_?"

"Hey, I beat _you_, didn't I?" I shot back, a little hurt by being treated like a run-of-the-mill bug catcher; just because I don't always remember that I'm special doesn't mean that I mind everyone else remembering. I mean, No trainer before me had actually gotten a Viridian badge from Blue. Few trainers even fight the Elite Four, let alone _win_. No other trainer had dared take on Team Rocket, except Lance, and he's far from run-of-the-mill. I had walked in the Hall of Fame and the dens of Gods.

So just a _little_ acknowledgement would be nice.

"It was definitely him," I insisted, gesturing to Red's Hall of Fame photograph, hanging in pride of place on the living room wall. "Hey, it wasn't an _easy_ battle. I've never had a tougher fight in my life. It took everything I had. But it was him. That was his team, all stronger than anything I've ever seen. He lead and finished with Pikachu. He looked exactly like that, only…" I frowned at the bright grin of the boy in the photo. The static image seemed more exuberant than the real person had been. "… I dunno, quieter? He didn't seem so… happy… but that's definitely him. He was even wearing the same outfit."

Professor Oak frowned. "Well, if you're sure… I wonder if something happened. It is unusual for him to go so long without contact…"

"Of course something's wrong with him!" Blue yelled, prompting his sister, Daisy, to sharply warn him to calm down. She was a pretty young lady who brewed the best tea I had ever tasted. "I mean, he got beaten," he continued indignantly, though more quietly. "Besides, _quiet_? Have you ever heard of that guy being any less than hyperactively happy? Well, I'm going to find out."

Blue pissed off the trainers a lot by disappearing from his gym for long periods, but this was probably the longest period yet. For two weeks straight, the gym was closed while Blue scoured the mountain, as did I, increasingly obsessed by the enigmatic champion who had come and gone without a word. Our searches occasionally overlapped, with both tips and insults flying from the both of us. We were developing a rival's friendship, built on mutual pride and respect. We even scaled the peak twice, taking the hardest and most dangerous journey as a team, but he was never there.

In the end, it was Blue and the nose of his Arcanine that found him. Red was buried deep under the snow, and evidently wasn't intended to be found.

Blue called me on my Pokégear. I got there to find him digging Red's thing out of the snow. His bag had been looted, personal possessions strewn across the snow, and the pokéballs on his belt smashed into pieces. According to Blue, that would have killed the Pokémon inside. We gathered up the pieces anyway. The only Pokémon outside of its pokéball was Pikachu, frozen into Red's arms. Like its master, it was riddled with bullet holes. Somebody had evidently gotten the hint that Red couldn't be beaten with Pokémon, or indeed any attack he'd seen coming; the entry wounds were all in Red's back. Blue's Rhyhorn carried the frozen lump down the mountain; we had neither the heart nor the strength to separate them.

I felt uncomfortable, standing next to Red's mom and the Oaks while an autopsy went on in the Saffron City hospital, but Blue insisted that I stay. The frozen corpses were impossible to analyze for time or date of death, but it must have been in the year since he had last seen his mother. Blue pointed out that we could further narrow it down to the two weeks since I had battle him, but I felt uneasy about that.

I couldn't help remembering how he hadn't shivered in the cold, how no breath had misted the air.

My uneasiness grew when Officer Jenny told us what she'd found out about the bullets pried from Red's body. Guns were rare in our world; wars in the past had been fought with powerful Pokémon. A few police officers had guns, and some criminals had guns, but they were still rare inventions, and so the bullets were easily traced to a gun belonging to Archer, the leader of the four Team Rocket Admins that I'd put in jail a few months ago. The gun had been sitting in an evidence locker ever since; It could last have been used perhaps six months ago, five and a half months before I had battled Red.

No breath in the air, no footprints in the snow. No items in his bag.

Blue, Daisy and Professor Oak all had their own theories about what I'd seen. Professor Oak thought of shapeshifting ghost Pokémon, Daisy thought that I must have been hallucinating from the cold and the lack of oxygen, Blue thought Archer had probably just broken out for a while and the police were covering it up to avoid looking incompetent. Red's mom never advanced a theory. I didn't really know what I saw. What I knew what that I'd battled with the strongest trainer that I'd ever seen on that mountain; and what I knew was that nobody yet knew exactly why Team Rocket had chosen to reappear when they did, nor why the boy who had beaten them so easily before had not returned to beat them again. Lance had even mentioned him to me, hoping he would appear.

After several days of pressuring, it was Petrel who broke down and confessed. They had recalled Team Rocket and attempted to recall Giovanni because his greatest threat was finally, definitely out of the way. But Giovanni hadn't reappeared.

I thought of the shrine in Ilex forest, and a hiding place under Tohjo Falls, and wondered if Red and Giovanni were getting their rematch now.

He had been so quiet, and solemn.

Just like everyone else at the funeral. I saw several prominent professors, all sixteen leaders, Elite Four past and present (Lorelei had left the Sevii Islands that she had left the Four to protect to help push Agatha's wheelchair; the old lady was so frail that she could no longer stand on her own, but that made her no less vicious, and poor Professor Oak seemed the target of choice for her snark). I saw celebrities like Mary, and Mr Fuji, and Bill, and Mr Pokémon, and Slowpoke the Safari Zone warden, fingering his gold teeth solemnly; I saw gym trainers and kid trainers and adult trainers, rich and poor, male and female, some even that I suspected to be escaped Team Rocket goons who had gone straight or at least undercover. That surprised me, especially how genuinely sad they looked, but I knew how the arrogant respected their betters. It wasn't that you had flaws, it was simply that they were untouchably good; they cannot be defeated or destroyed by anything if they're good enough to beat _you_. As such, they despise anything that threatens to damage or topple the object of their respect. It's an odd sort of respect bordering on hero-worship, but common coin in a world based around casual battle, and Red had clearly commanded it in spades.

Afterwards, Red's mom went back into her house, while the wake mulled around the bonfire that Red's body had been placed inside of to cremate, along with Pikachu's and the fragments of his pokéballs. It reminded me of a Viking funeral to send a king to the next world; but more than anything else, after so long in the snow, I thought he'd like the warmth.

She was sitting in Red's room, staring around at his untouched things. She looked so lost that for a moment, I didn't know what to say. Then I did.

"He smiled," I said softly. "He was enjoying the battle, I think. When I beat him, he smiled, and then he vanished."

There was a long silence. I wasn't sure if she's heard me. Then, "Thank you." That was all she said, and I had to leave then, because I knew that she understood and there was no more to be said. But she understood. We both did now. Dying undefeated left something empty, left a weight on the shoulders that was too much to sleep peacefully with. He needed to be beaten at his best, and I felt it the greatest honour of my life to have done so.

You might have noticed it by now, but I have a tendency for delayed realizations. It wasn't until I was back outside, staring into the dancing flames, that I realized that I had been wrong.

Being the best wasn't the only responsibility I had taken from him. The end of the battle hadn't been the only time that he had smiled.

And so, for the dead thirteen-year-old on the mountain, for the silent ghost in the snow, and for the fact that I was only eleven years old and I was already carrying responsibility beyond what anyone else would ever have to bear, I walked up to the nearest Team Rocket suspect, recognized him from the Lake of Rage, and punched his lights out.

Then, without saying a word, I walked away.

_Pokémon is the property of Tajiri Satoshi-sama, whom I worship for creating it. I would never try to steal his work. Pokémon belongs to him, though 488 Pokémon do belong to me. C'mon, Tajiri-sama, where's the European Celebi event?_


End file.
